The short answer is two months. In the spirit of being completely transparent about our process, here is the editing schedule for episode two:

What’s your editing setup/process look like?

I edit on a Macbook Pro laptop w/ Premiere Pro.

The first step I take is to create a folder structure for the project:

I’ll then import all the audio and video footage into PluralEyes in order to sync them. PluralEyes is exceptionally good at syncing — I’d say about an 80-90% success rate — and the rest usually needs to be manually synced (possibly because the camera audio is too low for the program to detect or that either the camera or H4n stopped recording, so PluralEyes can’t find the companion clip).

Next, I’ll set up bins in Premiere Pro like this:

Then I import the footage. I’ll also create a few Google documents and share them with the team: (1) Master Assets, (2) VO Scripts, (3) Master Schedule, (4) Color Keys, and (5) Treatment.

After organizing the bin structure, Chad or Zeb and I meet up for several days to cull through the footage and sort it all into folders or sequences.

All unsynced footage resides in a bin called RAW FOOTAGE. All synced footage is placed chronologically onto a timeline called THE WELL. Between those two places, we cast our fishing lines and scoop material into folders, giving them scene names.

I think one of the fundamental theories of editing is that it is easier to work from a micro to macro level than from a macro to micro level. Simply, this means that it’s easier to build up than to have to remove. (Maybe this holds true to part of the human condition as well; it is easier to forge bonds than to destroy them? Who knows.)

How do you pick and choose what to add to the timeline?

We’re both watching and listening for funny lines, important game development stories that progress the narrative forward, threads we want to keep or move into the Detour bin, etc. It helps for me to sit down with a developer to understand some terminology and note the difference between things that were actually carried out during the game jam and things that were part of a wish list.

For each clip, we try to consider sound, image and story as three equally important components to the episode (e.g. Will it be possible to improve this sound later? Does he go into too much depth here on the topic of free-to-play? Should we move it the Detour bin? Let’s grab this bit because of his facial reactions when he plays the game for the first time.)

It’s very important at this early stage to go through all the footage together not only so that we know what we have but also because filtering footage into as many bins as possible puts us ahead of the game when we’re trying to find it again later. For example, general travel footage can reside in the ‘Travel Bin’ and also ‘Whiteboarding’. If it sounds tedious, it’s because it probably is — but uber helpful down the editing pipeline.

While we’re sorting, we will also start color coding clips based on their content:

After one or two passes through sorting, I’ll group the colors together, then make edits into the clips, almost like creating a radio cut without paper. What we’re doing here is eliminating the time that it takes to transcribe interviews, strike out sentences, and build an editing script.

Sometimes though, I will take story notes in a document I call ‘Treatment’. It is a prose version of how scenes progress, but I generally use bullet points. For example, there is a scene in episode 3 where I wrote down:

After we finish sorting, hopefully the cut is down to a little over an hour.

Then we kind of attack the editing from all sides.

There is a document that’s called ‘Master Assets’. It’s a list of things we think are necessary for the episode to stand on its own. That includes Diego’s artwork, character animations, Chad’s code footage, Zeb’s level design footage, Zeb’s music, gameplay footage, VO scripts, After Effects Map Animations, nameplates, game jam scorecard design, etc.

Everyone pitches in to create the assets while I attempt to cut a scene down to its projected run time.

At this point, I’m thinking a little about pacing, maybe music and moving assets around, but mostly just trying to get through one scene pass from start to finish through trimming.

I am trimming up the uhs, ums and pauses, making everything sound quick and deliberate. If there are any design ideas that come to mind, I’ll jot those down, too.

At the end of the day, I’ll rig a time code stamp on the video and ship it to the team via Dropbox. I’ll usually receive feedback the next day but won’t look at it until I’m done doing first passes on all scenes.

The notes from the team are extremely helpful. They consist of suggestions for assets we need, comments on confusing lines, etc. The master asset list is updated again. Zeb made a very interesting observation one day that there’s this kind of ebb and flow happening where the timeline and list of things to do will expand, then contract, and finally we’ll start to see what the episode wants to be about.

We’ll kind of all have this instinctive feeling when we are one or two weeks out from finishing the episode. Backers are sent a rough cut and encouraged to email us with comments on the upcoming episode and suggestions for improvement. I do read all of them and take these into consideration!

There are more choices made with regard to music, sound effects, animations, title designs, fonts, etc.

I’ll spend the week leading up to release sound editing in Audition and color correcting, tweaking visual and audio transitions, moving around key frames in Premiere and/or After Effects.

The day before release, I render all the effects, export and upload the master sequence to YouTube on a private channel, type in the episode description and search tags.

On Friday, the episode is out there, and I am like the parent waving goodbye to the kid at the bus stop on his first day of school.

That’s it, folks! I may edit this series and include more pics on the process at a later time. I hoped you enjoyed that insight into the making of Indie Van Game Jam!

The Indie Van Game Jam is a comedy documentary web and video game series in which we travel around the country, interview independent game developers, and make games along the way in our van. You can check out the series on IndieVanGameJam.com and vote for us on Steam Greenlight.

First of all, many thanks to our friend Drew McGee for helping us out and tending the booth with us. Drew is a former compatriot of BioWare and has written for titles such as Bumble Tales and The Banner Saga. He’s also a bright, smiling face who got plenty of people to the booth as well as the hookup from the roaming Red Bull distributors. (Dat Red Bull Silver!)

It was such a treat to meet so many new faces and watch as people genuinely enjoyed our games. We met cosplayers of impressive caliber. Hardcore gamers with impressive skills. Parents who forgot how a simpler game could be fun for (and played by) anyone. Check out some of our attendees on our Facebook page!

Someone just found the sea serpent in our game ‘Round the World!

As mentioned, we were trying to promote our new Steam Greenlight campaign for Indie Van Game Jam! Everyone seemed to be digging what we were laying down. Everyone was crazy supportive. Fans loved our stickers and seemed to be really interested in the Indie Van Game Jam. Honestly, when you see Stunt Mitch or Round the World in-person, it’s hard not to be a fan.

Indie Heaven, the happening place for indies, was full of great stories and talent. From our high-school neighbors, SmartCade, to the hometown heroes, Dallas Society of Play, the room contained a great level of passion. While Scott got completely addicted to Tumblestone, Chad flocked to KR-17. Big thanks to them and all the other exhibitors who we got to meet.

Indie Van Game Jam is a reality web series about the challenges three indie game developers take to create video games in a van — in a compressed amount of time — as they road trip across North America. Special guests (seasoned indie devs) play the games and provide helpful feedback and suggestions for improvement along the way. The team learns valuable lessons about game design and teamwork along the way.

Our plan was to travel to 7 cities in less than 90 days. In fact, for two weeks back-to-back we shot three episodes and traveled to three cities! That’s three playable games in 2 weeks — and a lot of coffee!

This is the definition of BADASS.

Here’s what the team’s January calendar looked like this year:

Shooting schedule for January

Step 1: Buy a van.

Blue van is a GO!

Diego’s brother (who is fortunately a mechanic!) helped the team out by sending us Craigslist links to about 8 conversion vans in the DAL-ATX-HOU area, as well as tagging along to inspect its quality and driving performance.

Once we procured Big Blue and had it brought to our mechanic, Art, for repair and winterization, the series’ biggest missing component had been solved. The van was a Dodge B2500 High Top Conversion Van with over 100,000 miles on it. She turned out to be gentle and kind to us even as we racked up another 100k miles.

(We toyed with the idea of painting her with the IVGJ logo, gutting her insides pimping our ride, but we fell short on funds… Six seasons and a movie?)

Step 2: Contacting Studios

While the logistics were being ironed out for purchasing a van, I was reaching out to indie studios and gauging their interest level in being part of the web series.

In my opening emails, I would try to address questions that I felt indie devs would inevitably ask, such as, “Who are these guys? What is the web series about? Why should we [the indie studio] let them film here? Why do they specifically want us in an episode?” I wrote that in exchange for access to their studio for a day or two to film and demos/beta keys/etc. to play their games and capture gameplay footage, we’d provide them with high quality marketing material that would showcase their latest and greatest games. Plus, we’d take them out to lunch.

I was surprised by how welcoming people were! Here are some of the emails from the indie devs:

Reading these emails again made me feel incredibly appreciative of how welcoming and receptive the indie devs were to our pitch.

Once we had all seven studios on board (we tried in lock in all filming dates with studios before traveling), it was time to get serious (not that we weren’t up until that point!)

Step 3: Prepare!

We set out to procure what we didn’t have: hotel room reservations and/or lodging with friends, episode travel itineraries, emergency supplies, equipment purchasing/rental, equipment insurance, car insurance, release forms, beta codes and/or demos to play the indie games on Steam, driving directions, packing equipment, hard drives, etc. We actually got really lucky and only had to do the hotel deal twice.

We researched what news had already been covered on the developer/studios. Doing so forced us to familiarize ourselves with the company’s culture, history, and the surrounding indie scene in each city (for example, this Polygon article on Klei: http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/5/29/4362838/the-birth-and-re-birth-of-klei) , as well as generate interesting interview questions if we ran out of ones to ask.

I’d like to state that we followed through with all of these plans as a team of FOUR people working at a startup. Again, that’s badass.

Step 4: More Research!

The components of any single episode ideally include:

Intro Animation

Binary Solo HQ: Game Analysis

Studio Intro

Travel: {Whiteboarding, Art, Coding, SFX, Pit Stops, etc.}

Studio Game Jam Playthrough

Game Jam finish (in the van)

Wrap-up

Credits

Link to download the game

I then set out on to put together a kind of “look book” for the series based on web series with similar content, tone, and aesthetic for reference. In retrospect, this was a tedious task but a necessary one, IMO. I wanted to understand what other web series were doing, the aesthetics they embraced and how we could possibly differentiate ourselves from similar ones.

The series we looked at for inspiration were Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, Man Vs. Food, Mythbusters, Penny Arcade, and Indie Game: The Movie.

In addition to assembling a look book, I started to create a shot wish list, breaking down the scenes into their visual components. For example, under the Whiteboarding scene, I wrote down “packing, tracking shot of van, GoPro dev cam, pitstop commentary, computer screens, keyboards, eyes, interviews with the team.” I knew that at the very least, if I captured a majority of these things on camera, we could stitch together an arc to the episode.

One of the last components we had to film as a team that I still consider pre-pro was the Binary HQ scene for all episodes. This segment consisted of having the team meet at Zeb’s place on a Friday or Saturday and spending time sampling the indie studio’s gameography, then thinking about the common threads their games exemplified and finally developing the central game design question for the episode. For instance, the game design question in episode one was: How can we remove an essential element from a game genre and still have people think it’s that genre?

And with that, like when Captain Picard took the helm of the Enterprise and set sail to Farpoint Station, we started the drive to Chicago, IL in December to visit Rob Lach.

My experience with filming run-and-gun short documentaries has taught me that it’s imperative to pack as light and as efficiently as possible. I wouldn’t have the space in the van to store lighting equipment, we wouldn’t have the production crew/manpower to stage and clear the equipment quickly in the indie studios, and finally we would be driving during winter, which of course meant direwolves and traveling on foot through snow and ice — not so good when you’re carrying around expensive candy.

TL;dr Make sure you pack light and can move quickly with equipment in order to keep up with the team.

When choosing a camera for any production, there are a couple of important deciding factors for me that go into renting or purchasing one: (a) weight, (b) dynamic range, and (c) environment.

A. Weight

Will the camera’s weight slow you down? If you like to move with subjects by using a shoulder mount, if you need to fit through tight spaces, you probably won’t be carrying Red Epic around with you.

The cost of energy expended from putting the camera down and setting it back onto your shoulder means that your ability to press record in time to capture spontaneous moments is that much slower. One of the primary objectives of a good cinematographer IMO is to minimize his chances at missing moments that typically happen in the blink of an eye (and thus can’t be repeated without some degree of acting and inauthenticity).

B. Dynamic Range

What is your lighting situation going to be? With documentaries, it’s hard to predict where your subjects will move and how to light them properly and persistently over time. This means that I must be able to punch in my ISO as fast as possible.

When the team returned home to Austin from Chicago in episode one for example, they had a post-mortem on the game jam process inside the van. It was 2AM and pitch black out. So we strung a couple of Diego’s camping lights up onto the side panels to give everyone some light, and I bumped up the ISO on the Mk3 to maybe 10,000. It’s hella grainy, but you make out their silhouettes and it gets the job done.

C. Environment

How well will the camera withstand traveling and weather conditions? Fortunately the 5D’s batteries never froze, but a better choice may have been a Sony or Panasonic HDV cam.

Tl;dr There are many factors that go into choosing a camera and its support, such as weight, dynamic range, environment, S-Logs, stability, etc. Don’t let the analysis paralyze you from going out into the field and experimenting with one or the other.

Most of the gear fit into a single PortaBrace that I slung over my shoulder and one Osprey backpack!

(War mode + epic beard ftw)

Editing happens on a Macbook Pro using PluralEyes to sync sound, Premiere Pro to edit, Photoshop and After Effects for designing stuff (mostly tweaking Diego’s awesome animations he’s shipped me!), Audition for sound editing. We use the El Gato Capture HD device hooked up to 2 laptops and 1 TV to record various development stages and Screenflow to capture a plethora of other things: missing gameplay footage, scrolling code, character animations in Unity, etc.

In case you’re interested in learning more about what goes into choosing a camera, check out this awesome post over at No Film School with thoughts from Still Motion:

Much like the characters in Game of Thrones promise that “Winter is coming,” I also promise that episode two is coming soon. You probably won’t see it coming. It will knock you off your socks, then knock you out of them again when you’re putting them on the second time.

This week, we experienced a huge morale blow when our 4TB hard drive, the hub of all Indie Van Game Jam data, failed to boot up. But we sent it to an IT Recovery Service, and now it’s back up and running!

In the meantime, I have been working off another external hard drive with backup files and have synced picture and sound for episode three(!).

The main reason that episode two is really taking a while to release in addition to all the tech and software troubleshooting — is that we want make the best possible episode for you!

Each episode (~ 22 minutes) is somewhat unique in terms of its story beats, adding to the time it takes to crack it. To the extent that we know roughly the chronological outline of each episode (you can see that below), we really don’t know for certain where the pieces fit inside those scenes and how they develop/payoff until we open some Topo Chicos and discuss.

The episode’s story starts making more sense when we view a rough cut of everything that could be in the episode (the rough cut is anywhere from 1 – 3 hours!) From that point forward, our meetings involve making tough choices related to cutting lines or entire scenes, generating a master assets list of things we usually don’t have but need to generate for the episode, designing and/or revising animations and title cards, creating voice over scripts, and re-sifting through A LOT of footage to make sure we’ve chosen the crème de la crème in terms of jokes, gameplay content and interview material (roughly 10 hours of footage per episode). Phew!

Intro Animation

Binary Solo HQ: Game Analysis

Studio Intro

Travel: {Whiteboarding, Art, Coding, SFX, Pit Stops, etc.}

Studio Game Jam Playthrough

Game Jam finish (in the van)

Wrap-up

Credits

Link to download the game

In the meantime, we’ve read through everyone’s generous feedback from episode one (thank you!) and are confident that this episode outshines the previous one.

Additionally, we hope to provide some exciting extra content as soon as the episode releases.

We even have a tentative title for you (spoiler alert):

Episode Two: Wizards of the East Coast

This is Part I of IV of a series about the making of Indie Van Game Jam.